John McMurtry designed the Higgins Block, the three-story brick building on West Main Street in front of you, and it rose in 1872. Up close you can still read the language of its original cast‑iron, Italianate facade: it once framed five storefronts, each with three window bays, a fuller commercial block than what remains today. What you see now is the surviving two‑storefront remnant of that original block — a fragment left after the building was shortened in 1912 when the Fayette National Bank Building required demolition of part of the Higgins Block.
The site also carries quieter stories: an 1900 public auction sold the east 18‑foot exposure to divide the Higgins family estate, a sale that may have helped preserve what survives. The block was recognized on the National Register of Historic Places in 1977, a formal nod to its architectural and civic value. The family behind the name is present in the record too: John Allen Higgins, 1831–1880, a planter who owned a farm near Lexington and a plantation in Arkansas, was a son of Joel Higgins and lived at Lexington’s Higgins Mansion until his death.
Only two of the original five storefronts remain, the rest cut away in 1912 to make room for the Fayette National Bank Building.